GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 331334
Pathbar's left arrow is not re-enabled correctly
Last modified: 2007-01-25 17:19:57 UTC
The fake root behaviour seems to serve little purpose and is distruptive to presenting consistant behaviour and interface to the user. On clicking on the "home" directory in the bookmarks panel the path_bar displays the home directory alone as if it was the top of the file hierachy. This induces a scroller which would not normally by shown. Once the user steps above the home directory the behaviour reverts to normal file browsing. It's an axiom of good UI design: such varying modes of behaviour depending on context are generally to be avoided in favour of consistant functioning. It is probably quite sufficient to indicate the home directory with the special icon. This gives a clear indication without disrupting consistant functionality. Other information:
Created attachment 59437 [details] [review] patch to disable fake-root behaviour.
The bug is that the leftmost arrow in the pathbar sometimes gets disabled, but not re-enabled in the right circumstances. The Nautilus pathbar handles this correctly; can you please see where both code bases differ?
Federico, can you give a recipe for reproducing the wrongly insensitive left arrow ? I can't seem to reproduce it.
that is Federico's reinterpretation (and title change) of the bug I posted. my original point is that the same space on the screen changes drastically from one moment to the next. This is confusing to the user , screen elements should remain consistant in function. Here the two buttons which occupy exactly the same space and have very similar dimensions and more over the icons are masked by the mouse cursor when the user does click on, them have very different fuctions. This is disrouting and poor design. The fake_root behaviour that does this by design is , IMHO , counter-intutitive and yet another of the many "modes" of behaviour that hinder the usability of this interface. Another way to ameliorate this without removing the fake_root senario would be to reserve the space for the buttons when not visible. In this way the appearance of the button would be clearly visible and apparent to the user. The usage of the screen area would be consistent. Now that the path bar has gone full-width this is quite acceptable. The switching around may have been a forced compromise in the original design when the pathbar was so short of space.
The two bugs: 1. The left arrow seems to "change" to the root button. Open a new file chooser; it will probably appear in $HOME: [<][federico] Click on the [<], and the path bar is now this: [/][home][federico] but since the mouse is on the [/], clicking again doesn't scroll to the left any further, but rather switches you to a completely different directory (/). The [<] arrow should never disappear. It should just get disabled once we are scrolled all the way to the left. 2. Sometimes you switch between folders so that you end up in $HOME, and the path bar becomes [<][federico] with the [<] arrow disabled, so you can't scroll it to the left. I can't always reproduce this.
thanks Frederico, your explaination was a bit clearer than mine. the problem is it depends _how_ you came to be in $HOME as to whether you get fake root or not. It's all very confusing and inconsistent. personally I'd like to see fake_root dropped as per the patch I supplied. When you open a dlg you are in : [root_icon][home][federico] , not scrollers , you know where you are. Otherwise there are two ways to go: 1. as you suggest , [<] is always visible , greyed out when not needed (in root dir) , which is perfectly valid and trivial to code; 2. as I suggested above hidden when not sensitive , but it's space is retained to prevent the inconsistancies in the display. This may be more aesthetic since the scroller is rarely needed on full width pathbar, but slightly more effort to code. My bottom line, lose fake_root behaviour.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 328095 ***